Samantha Power

Samantha Power is President Obama’s handpicked ambassador of the United States to the United Nations. She made her name as the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. The book decries the indifference of American foreign policy to modern mass murder up to and including the monstrosities committed in Kosovo and Rwanda and so on. I thought that Power’s book failed »

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, delivered the commencement address at Barnard College on Sunday. Consistent with her ridiculous tweet of the same day, Power compared the situation of women in the U.S. with those in Afghanistan. As Eric Owens of the Daily Caller reports: Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the graduating class at all-female Barnard College that women continue to suffer »

Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has tweeted the following: From a wmn carrying a mattress on her campus to Afghanistan’s Wmn’s Nat Cycling Team, reaching true equality req showing change is possible. The woman with a mattress is, as Katie Pavlich explains, a reference to Emma Sulkowicz. She is the Columbia University student who carried a mattress around the campus as part of her “carry that »

This article about Samantha Power by Manuel Roig-Franzia of the Washington Post is mainly an attempt to explain away the fact that the famous anti-genocide crusader faithfully serves an administration that has done essentially nothing in response to mass murder in Syria. Along the way we learn that, for Power, “boring” has never been “ok.” This tidbit may explain a lot. Perhaps Power never really hated Israel; those anti-Israeli statements »

Samantha Power is a preening phony, but I never thought she was stupid. As the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, she has emitted the lame statement below condemning the regime of Syrian president for life Bashar al-Assad as out of step with the “whole world.” Among the many true statements one could make to condemn Assad, Power can’t pull an arrow from the quiver. If Assad has her »

Yesterday U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power delivered the Daniel Pearl Lecture at UCLA and met with Pearl’s parents. Afterward, she unburdened herself of this tweet: Daniel Pearl's story is reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break cycles of violence. @DanielPearlFNDN — Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) February 24, 2014 I saw this on Twitter late last night and pondered it for a while. What is it supposed to mean? I »

It requires little discussion to show that the U.N. approved resolution on chemical weapons in Syria is a joke. As Brett Schaefer and Baker Spring point out, the resolution is toothless because it fails to establish a direct enforcement mechanism for assuring the complete application of Chemical Weapons Convention requirements in Syria. The resolution provides that in the event of non-compliance with its terms, the Security Council will impose undefined »

I took a look at Samantha Power’s speech at the Center for American Progress this past Friday supporting finely tuned, perfectly calibrated military action against Syria yesterday here and here. What Power says matters. Power is our Ambassador to the United Nations, but more than that she is the advocate of purportedly humanitarian interventions by the United States around the world. Power reportedly played an important role in promoting the »

In the torrent of words produced by Obama administration officials to support finely tuned, perfectly calibrated military action against Syria, I have looked for two propositions: (1) a statement of the national interest of the United States in the action, and (2) some idea of the means to be dedicated to achieving the ends. Obama himself has given us little along these lines. At his recent press conferences in Stockholm »

It was a year ago on August 20 that President Obama laid down his red line regarding the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria. A video of Obama laying down his red line is below. Assad crossed the red line a while back with no discernible consequence. He now appears to have recrossed the red line even further with the massacres outside Damascus this week. Fouad »

In 2003, Samantha Power wrote in the New Republic: We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. . . Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When Willie Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II »

President Obama’s nominee to serve as our ambassador to the United Nations is the vile Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell. I think the title of her book is a case of projection. At her confirmation hearing today, she was questioned about a statement from her 2003 New Republic article in which she wrote that American foreign policy needed “a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored »

Dana Milbank defends the patriotism of Samantha Power which, he says, was publicly questioned the other day by Frank Gaffney, Allen West, and others. The quotations Milbank cites do not use the word “patriotism,” but they scathingly imply that Power lacks that attribute. Milbank assures us, however, that he knew Power in college and “was unaware that she was un-American.” I wouldn’t put much stock in this, though. John Hinderaker »

Michael Gerson becomes the latest member of the Republican establishment to dive into the tank for Samantha Power, President Obama’s anti-Israel nominee for U.N. Ambassador. Like others in this category, Gerson apparently has been charmed by his personal interaction with Power. It appears to be Power’s passion and fire that charmed Gerson. Gerson initially found her to be an unfair, partisan critic of the Bush administration in which Gerson served. »

I always expect the worst from Lindsey Graham, and he rarely disappoints. Today, Graham strongly backed Samantha Power for the U.N. ambassador post. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was his statement that Power “will be a strong supporter of our close friend and ally Israel.” As I said, Graham rarely disappoints. I wonder what evidence Graham would cite in favor of his claim that Power, with her record »

I think of our newly appointed ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power in the words of the title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book: “A Problem From Hell.” Power passionately believes that the armed forces of the United States should serve causes far larger than the national interest of the United States. Of the commenters on Power’s nomination, Ralph Peters is the only one I have seen make this point. »

The label “neoconservative” has been misused and abused so frequently that it has lost most of its substantive meaning. Without getting deep into the details, consider that the most famous neoconservative article ever published, Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” argued against democracy promotion as a guiding principle of American foreign policy: Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, »